I did a book cover project for the wife of a friend of mine. I think it came out pretty good, what do you think?
If you wish to download the book, you can find it here: Leaving Stage IV
Author Archives: Eric_Tolladay
Dwelling design and politics
What if the great rift that separates the left and the right were not in fact a product of political belief, but an artifact (at least in part) of design?
This is at heart the premise I’ve come up with while reading over a wonderful book called The Death And Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I should start by saying this is not Ms. Jacobs premise at all. Her book is about urban planing and how the way a city is designed will effect the way people live within it. The book is wonderfully clear, straight forward, and has taken my mind into places of design I had never contemplated before. More importantly, it made me question the way we socialize and how that socialization might change our character.
At the beginning of her book, Ms. Jacobs talks about the use of sidewalks. Not as a conveyance (although that is covered too) but as a social structure. Its about how the many small things, corner grocery stores, bars, front porches, stoops, stairways, and any old place that people will use to congregate, will give those living on a street a sense of shared ownership. Such places allow the people living and working there to establish social relationships that are numerous, shallow, and yet important, and at the same time they make a sharp divide between public social lives, and private ones.
While her book mostly talks about these relationships in the context of a city, I could not help but translate this into the small-town world I grew up in where everyone on the block knew your name, and if you did something stupid they would be happy to tell your parents. I got my first job though small town connections, and my first sense of the world though them as well.
Mind you, these small town connections were not always appreciated. I remember vividly one Friday afternoon when a Clovis cop gave me a tongue lashing for throwing my bundled up dirty gym clothes against a street sign. At the time I thought he was being a power-hungry jerk, but I never tossed anything at a street sign after that. Moreover, what I now understand as an adult but could not see then as a sullen teen was that his anger was not directed at any potential damage to the street sign, his anger came from a sense of ownership. He owned that sign, at least in part, because it was part of his world, and he felt a sense of responsibility for it. In the same way he felt responsible enough to me and my actions to say something.
That is both the gift, and the cost of group ownership. The joy and the responsibility, both at the same time. And I believe that this is a crucial element to small town America, and more importantly large city America.
Except it is no longer an element in either.
How many of you know your neighbors? How many of you trust them? No I don’t mean trust like share your innermost secrets with, that kind of trust belongs within the private relationships of your family and close friends. By trust I mean trust enough to leave a key to your house with them, and conversely owning a key to their house in your home.
I ask this because Ms. Jacobs mentions that on her block the local deli has keys to half the homes around it. This is an informal thing. The deli owner is not paid for this, and does not offer it as a service. That he holds their keys makes it easy for relatives or outsiders to visit, even if the owner of the house is not home. You can tell your friend, “Go down to the deli and ask Joe for the key.” Its safer than keeping a key under the doormat, and it means that anyone coming to visit is noted on the block and looked after.
So why does Joe the deli owner do this? He doesn’t get paid, and it doesn’t necessarily lead to any more service. Why do the home owners do this? There are no contracts, no signatures, nothing legal at all, and such a situation is ripe for abuse. Yet one block over it’s the candy store that holds the keys for that block, and the next block it’s the cleaners, and the block after that…
At the heart of these relationships is a thing called public trust. Its not a close relationship, its not like a close friendship, its more informal, and much more shallow. Its trading a little bit of your private space for a little bit of theirs. Its exchanging small bits of information over coffee. Its the bits of gossip that are helpful and not necessarily hurtful. Helping the new mother with the complex ins and outs of the school district, telling a lost neighbor the quickest way to the bus stop, offing a cup of flour to a neighbor who is out, feeding the neighbor’s cat when they go out of town, or driving a neighbor to the airport.
These things are not all that important. There’s is no specific reason why one “needs” to do these things for or with their neighbors, yet by doing these things one gains a sense of belonging, a feeling that they are part of a larger community. Everyone starts to own a part of a public space that is independent of them, yet beneficial to them.
And beneficial it is. As Ms. Jacobs points out, city blocks that have a shared sense of ownership experience much less crime. The kids are much less delinquent, there are less robberies, and much less strife. Why? Because everyone is watching out for everyone else. If your kid acts up, your neighbors will tell you about it. If a suspicious looking guy starts following women, he’ll be accosted. If a drunk gets too angry, he’ll be held in check. Someone is always willing to call the police for you, because they know you’ll do the same for them. And why do they do that? Because they know you. They see you everyday walking your kid to school, or buying a cup of coffee at the newsstand, or picking up a head of lettuce for your wife and the corner grocery. They don’t know you well, but they know you well enough to have a sense of belonging to you. By living in their area and interacting with them you have become one of “them”. Part of their team. Close enough to call the cops if a burglar starts to pry open your window, but not close enough that they need to know everything about you.
And its this sense of community, this belongingness, that I think sits right at the heart of our political divide.
Let me first start out by saying that I don’t think one political group has more of a sense of belonging than another. I think they’re both pretty equal right down the line, because I think the desire to form and maintain social contacts is equally distributed amongst the entire population. Sure some people want little public contact, and some people want more, but on average, either group of people has pretty much the same desire.
So since it is not lacking of desire, then what lies at the difference between the two political sides. Well I think it is the way in which we form and maintain or social contacts.
Rural Americans live far apart from each other. I know people who would have to walk a half mile to knock on a neighbor’s door. This is a massive distance when compared to a suburb like ours (about 60 feet, to either side), or an apartment in the city (as little as across the hall, or as long as 30 feet down the hall). This distance makes for some interesting things. For instance our more rural cousins enjoy a lot more privacy than those living in the city. They don’t have to put curtains on their windows so the neighbors can’t see in, there’s not a house close enough to worry about. On the reverse side, our city dwelling cousins enjoy much more social contact. All I have to do is step outside the front door and I’m almost guaranteed to talk to someone. Teri jokes about this all the time. If we lived in an apartment it would be even easier. I’d just have to open the door. Now compare that to our friends living out in the country. Short of picking up the phone (or the internet) the only way they can have a conversation with someone not in their house is to get in a car and drive.
Now neither of these are good situations or bad ones. As far as I know there is no empirical difference between living in the sticks or living in the smog, with the exception of personal preference. One might prefer one over the other, and most people do, but the homes themselves are similar enough for all practical purposes, except for one obvious point. People who live in the city will have the opportunity for a larger and more complex social circle. In short, they will belong to a larger social group than those living in the country.
Now if you’re with me so far, then the rest should be easy. This is where we get to the heart of the political aspects. You see, one of the key differences between liberals and conservatives is how they see those around them. Both groups believe in helping their fellow man, both groups I believe genuinely care about other people, but both groups show their care is significantly different ways.
Conservatives like to keep their giving private. They like to donate to their church, or their school. If they see a poor man on the street, they like to hand their $20 over to that person themselves. And based on the amounts that they give, conservatives they care very much about their fellow man. Much more, in terms of dollars, then liberals.
But in all these things the giving is happening to someone who is socially close to them, or to an organization that is socially close. Why? Well look at the relationships a person maintains while living in the country. Family they see everyday, sometimes too much of them. Neighbors they see occasionally. The same is true of shop owners, and other merchants. The only other places they can make and maintain public relationships is either in school or at church.
Seeing this, a pattern starts to arise. Rural Americans will likely not have many social relationships, but the ones they do have will be tight and deep. And what do we see when we look at how conservatives give? We see them spending their money in the places that are close to them.
Now lets visit our liberal cousins living in a city. City people have much more opportunity for public trust, and use this to their advantage. While their rural neighbors might use 20 acres to gain a sense of safety, a city person uses their neighbors (and curtains) to the same effect. When we look at how city people like to give, we see they want to spend their money not on churches or on schools, but on their neighbors and their neighborhoods. Because they live in a tight web of social interactions they know that handing a poor person $20 might or might not help them. But they also know that handing that same $20 to the right person, within that poor person’s neighborhood, will definitely help them.
When a city person says that giving money to the poor is beneficial, what they mean is inserting money into the right place in a poor person’s social network, will greatly benefit them. But consider this same problem from the point of view of their cousin in the country. The country cousin doesn’t have a large social network. Such things are completely invisible to him. If you told him you keep a key to your house at the local deli he might go into shock. The idea is foreign to him. So saying you want to spend money on a thing he doesn’t see strikes him as foolish. “Why don’t you spend that money in church instead,” he’ll say, because this is exactly how he would solve the same problem in his social network.
“But that doesn’t work over here,” his city cousin would reply, because in his world this is true.
And thus we find ourselves at odds. Not over the desire to give, but the method in which it is accomplished. And these alternative methods of giving hold their roots in the ways that we live amongst each other. In short, the design of our communities constricts the way in which we view a problem, and how we come up with a solution.
Is it any wonder that liberals generally come from big cities and conservatives from more rural areas? Perhaps one of the reasons Americans become liberal or conservative might have something to do with the design of their surroundings.
9/11 Eleven Years On
Our flag is going up today because we love our country. But I have to say I don’t like this day. I didn’t like it 11 years ago when it scared the hell out of me, and I don’t like it any more today. In some ways it scares me even more now.
11 year ago we took a collective kick to the teeth. We learned that being American doesn’t make you magically less vulnerable to the plans of evil men. We learned that for all the cool things we are and do, we are still at the end of the day just as human as everyone else. We collectively bleed, we can be collectively hurt.
The best thing that came out of this experience was our neighbors. They all came out the night we lit candles on the curb, and we talked. We needed to talk. We needed to share. It was too much. Things were too important. Me made friendships that night that continue on to this day. It made the block we live on “our” block. It made our house more of a home. It gave us a sense of belonging. This is a priceless gift, as I see the effects on those who do not have this. So thank you 9/11, thank you America for that.
But born on that day was another thing, a more sinister thing. An ugliness born of the desire to somehow get back to where we were before that day. I understand the longing for innocence lost. I understand the need to feel safe, and as a father I certainly understand the need to protect our children from the world. But there is no protection that comes at the end of a fist. There is no protection — even for the country with the greatest military on the Earth — that cannot be overcome by evil men if given enough time and money. We cannot will away the scars of 9/11, and unlike Pearl Harbor we cannot conquer the country that gave us them.
So we are stuck. Stuck feeling vulnerable. Stuck feeling insecure. Stuck feeling like there is nothing we can do.
Except we are NOT stuck. This feeling, this giant collective insecurity, can ALSO be a good thing. It can teach us what it is like to live pretty much anywhere else in the world. We can empathize with people from Somalia, Cambodia, Columbia, and China, because everyone else ALSO has this feeling. This is a good thing, a collective thing. A knowledge that even though we can be hurt we can also work together to not let our children all over the Earth be hurt like this again. Oh I don’t know if it is possible to keep every child on the Earth safe from feeling this way, but I think that’s a damn fine goal to have. I mean if we’re going to think of ourselves as exceptional, why not be exceptional for something worth being exceptional about?
This is the lesson I learned from 9/11. This is the lesson I learned the night my neighbors came over and we shared our collective grief, and in that sharing forged friendships that pushed back the darkness. Just a little mind you, but still pushed it back.
Terrorists can manipulate your massive and awesome military, heck they are trained to do this. Terrorist can make you feel insecure, and vulnerable. But the one thing they cannot do is take aware your friendships. Terrorist thrive on your terror and your fear, but they have no response to love, they don’t have a clue what to do about caring when they are expecting bombs.
So on this 9/11, I say we be exceptionally caring, exceptionally loving, and exceptionally dangerous to those who want us afraid. What better way is there to fuck with those sons of bitches than to respond to their evil with loving and care?
On Deficits and Spending
This article came up on FaceBook this morning.
I liked the article, but found it takes too many liberal ideas and presents them as fact without supporting them. Perhaps this is just a function of its length. But, the central point of the US being wrapped up in a deficit debate, is worthy of more consideration.
Ponder this: All through the Great Depression (which was most of the 1930s) the big debate in Washington was about deficit spending. Unlike today’s debate, they were all twisted up about ANY deficit spending, as in spending one dime over a balanced budget. The idea just flat out scared them. To let a budget go over what was allocated was madness to them, exactly like we talk about the “massive government debt” and “passing on our debt to our grandchildren”.
This fear of a non-ballanced budget (which we now know does not destroy a country) was so pervasive that it kept all social programs, especially the New Deal programs on a short leash. Too short, in fact. It also kept on defense department stunted at a time when it was critical to expand it.
Just like today, the two major sides were a Democratic party President (and congress) trying to spend our way out of economic gloom, and a Republican opposition resisting any effort to spend over the balance point.
When Pearl Harbor came, it did the one thing that neither party could do; it united the country. And in that unity we gave up the smaller fear of running with an unbalanced budget, for the greater fear of being overrun by fascism or Japanese militarism. In essence, the conservative fears of the dangers of an unbalanced budget suddenly had no traction. Our government started spending like drunken sailor. At one point we actually spent more, in terms of percent of the GDP, then we do today. Overnight we went from zero to 100. We also raised taxes like you would not believe, especially on the rich, and even rationed a huge number of materials (a move pretty much every economist will tell you will slow down the economy).
And the end result? One of the largest and longest growth spurts in our nation’s history. The wonderful economic bubble of the 50s and 60s was based on the spending of the early 1940s.
If there is something I would want to pass on to my grandchildren, it would be something like that. And yes, it came about from “out of control” government spending.
Jesus on the bus
I met Jesus in the bus yesterday morning. He was a polite gentleman who was reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which turns out to be light reading for someone with a BA in Urban Planning. So now you know what Jesus is reading.
Jesus turned out to be an interesting chap. He’s from down here, but lived in Texas for a while, where he said the idea of Urban Planning has been deeply mixed with that of business. So much so that the electorate are referred to as “clients”, and one is expected to drop everything to deal with their calls. I can see the appeal for working like this, after all it is how I work, but I can also see the distraction. Too much mixing of business practices into governance is probably not a good idea, the two not being anything like the same process, but one cannot often tell Republicans this. I got the feeling Texas was a bit too conservative for our dear Jesus, but he never directly stated anything along those lines. A sharp man, that. He was carefully politically neutral throughout our conversation.
I wish him well on his TA work in the Geology Department at Santa Monica College, and hope his career choices bring him fulfillment and happiness.
And now I have one more book to add to my reading list, which is always a delightful thing.
The Inbetween
Tonight I ran across an interesting man on my way home. The truth is I didn’t find him, he found me while I was waiting for Teri and Trevor to come and pick my up at the North Hollywood subway station.
I noticed him because he walked slowly in front of me. He was young, early 20s I’d guess, hispanic (a Latino) by appearance, but I don’t know if he spoke Spanish. I say I noticed him, but really he noticed me, as in he looked at me while I was sitting there holding up my Kindle and reading a novel. When I say he looked at me, I mean he really looked at me.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but most people in a public setting do not look at you. Oh they might glance at you, but there never let their glance rest on you for long. They look, and then quickly look away. Sometimes a gaze will linger, but this is almost always to express some form of sexual intent, or aggression. Rarely will a man gaze at me, especially a young man. A naked straight-into-the eye stare is considered a hostile act by most. Certainly it makes people uncomfortable.
(Don’t believe me? As an experiment, the next time you’re out in public openly stare at people. Look them straight into the eyes and do not look away. See what happens. Note: this will be taken as an aggressive act if they are the same sex, or a sexual advance if they are the opposite. Do this at your own risk.)
Anyway, this guy was staring at me. In the eyes. Only his expression was neutral, perhaps even thoughtful. There was no hint of anger. He seemed genuinely interested, like he was staring at a flower, or a car. There was not the least hint of negative intent, or of any understanding that his actions could be considered negative. In short, he was innocent.
Then he asked me what time it was. I clicked the menu button on my Kindle and told him it was 8:23. I told him several different ways. Finally he responded when I told him the way we used to tell the time at the Ren Faire (eight and twenty). His response was to repeat my words back to me.
He looked fascinated at my Kindle, so I showed it to him. He stood there for a second, never speaking. Looking both at the Kindle, and then into my eyes. Back and forth, back and forth. It was unnerving. He was really looking at me.
Then he walked to my right, and sat down next to me. Now I was sitting on a concrete rim of a planter there at the subway station. There were lots of people milling about, high school kids in black sporting skateboards, somber-faced old latinas walking along to their next bus, business people of every stripe and station, and even a few bums and drunks. And this guy. The one now sitting next to me. Only he wasn’t sitting next to me, he was sitting next to me. As in too close. Much too close.
Again, this sort of thing is usually considered an aggressive act, or a sexual one. But he wasn’t interested in either. Or at least I should say he wasn’t giving off the social clues for either.
So I asked him, “How ya doing?”
Its a straight enough question that most Spanish speakers can get the meaning. He responded, with a kind of non-word. A grunt, or maybe a sigh. Essentially a sound without any meaning. At least to me.
Then I looked up, and saw Teri drive up to the kiss and ride. I said goodbye to my newly found friend, and got moving to the car. Luckily he did not follow. If he had, I’m not sure what I would have done.
When I told Teri about this, she exclaimed she would have jumped up and moved away as soon as the guy sat down next to her. No doubt wise advice for a woman. Me, I’m pretty comfortable around the mentally ill, and the strange. This guy I think was likely just retarded. Possibly lost. Perhaps he doesn’t speak English. Who knows?
All I know is he was weird, and if I got a chance to talk with him at any length, I would have probably liked him, much like you like a new puppy. Only people are not puppies.
Resolution on Outdoor Campaigns
Someone on a professional retouching board I belong to, asked a question below. The majority of this post is my response. It is reposted here because the board is for members only and links will not work for non-members.
The posted question was: Does anyone have any tips for the best way to upsize an image for billboard use?
Here is my response:
I do a lot of outdoor campaigns, (or a mix of outdoor and print) so I run into this issue all the time. Worse, many print places that handle large outdoor pieces will establish some crazy guidelines for the artwork they accept. 200 dpi at size for a 14′ x 48′ billboard. Things like that.
In addition almost everything I do is composited, based upon 3-5 photos (sometimes a lot more), so the artwork is a bit more “created out of thin air” than what many retouchers deal with. Most of the outdoor work I do are ads for television, typically 2-3 big heads (or bodies) and some kind of background. Because of this the techniques I use may not work for you particular situation.
(As a curious aside, most television clients refer to outdoor campaigns are Out Of Home, or OOH. Why, I do not know)
So here’s the rules I have slowly discovered over the years:
1) Work at the native resolution of your original images, if at all possible.
This is the most important part of working a campaign of large outdoor pieces. The original artwork will be at whatever resolution it was shot at. This is your starting point, and if it was shot well, and high enough resolution at the start, the only point. For me this means I construct everything at the resolution of my worst photo (or if it is especially bad at some mid point). For the purposes of discussion, we’ll call this selected photo our ALPHA. All images will revolve around its resolution.
In practical terms this means retouching the native images as large as they will come out of RAW, and making sure the work (masks, color corrections, retouching, etc.) will transport well to your composited final files. I’ve found Smart Objects do this well, but not always.
If you doing a campaign (as opposed to a one-off) then build your first composited final piece at whatever resolution your ALPHA photo works to. (if you’re doing a one-off, then assume only one final composition)
This sounds complex, but actually it’s pretty straight forward. I’ll take the initial file (for me this is always a lower resolution comp provided by a design firm), flatten all the layers, and then drag this flattened piece on top of my retouched ALPHA. From that point I simply scale the flattened comp to the correct size so it matches my ALPHA. I find it easy to INVERT the image, and set the OPACITY to 50%, before scaling. Others do other tricks. The important point is to make sure you know EXACTLY what percentages the image was scaled.
For the purpose of discussion, lets say your final composited file needs to be scaled 254.82% to match the size of your ALPHA.
Assuming that the final file is built to mechanical specs in terms of length, width, and bleed (you did build to spec, right?), then all we have to do is change the resolution of the final file to match the ALPHA. Lets say your final file is 150 dpi. Length and width do not matter as we are not going to change them. To scale your 150 dpi file by 254.82% all you have to do is multiply the two numbers, and divide by 100. So 150 x 254.82 = 38223. Take that number and divide by 100 (38223 / 100 = 382.23). So the final resolution of your file will be 382.23 dpi. Set your image size to this (change the dpi ONLY, not anything else), wait for the file to rez up, and then save it off.
Now your ALPHA image should drop right in without resizing.
2) Build your background elements, and any other photos, to the size of your ALPHA.
Once you have them all together make sure you test for accuracy and fidelity. If you have several composited image you may have to tweak them to get them to appear the same level of sharpness. This is why my ALPHA is often my worst file, because everything else will look better.
When the file is done/approved, put it in your mechanical, (Most of my clients dump a flattened TIFF from the final file into an InDesign mechanical. You might do it differently), and you’re good to go.
3) Send the file away to the printers.
On occasion, I’ll get a printer that insists that their specs are the only “correct” ones, and demand the file at “their” resolution. (Never mind that a photo shot at 300 dpi will never be any better than 300 dpi.) To fix a file for them I add a final step. I flatten everything in my final file I can get away with (which is everything that is not type or vector, but excludes any noise layers) and then rez the flattened file up to the specs they require. If there is a noise layer on the top of the composited file, then I rebuild the noise at the final resolution (as opposed to rezzing it up). This will make the printer happy and save you lecturing them on the stupidity of assuming higher resolution is automatically better.
Now all of this came about because there is a lot of confusion out there about resolution and what it means. As I mentioned above, a 300 dpi image is never going to be better than at 300 dpi. Yes you can build it at 600 dpi, or more, but then your going to be doing all kinds of tricks with it to get it to be sharp, and the file is going to take almost twice as long to build.
You clients may or may not know this. They may be under the false assumption that higher rez is always better. Its not. For instance, a blurry shot at 300 dpi is just as bad as a blurry shot at 600 dpi, with the possible exception that one can retouch a 300 dpi file much faster than a 600 dpi one. So uprezing a 300 dpi blurry shot to 600 dpi, just to retouch, is a waste of your time.
There’s another thing. Most outdoor is not printed high rez. I’ve seen billboards printed at a 25 line screen. Do you have any idea how big the dots are at that size? More over, most outdoor is not viewed close up. Most billboards are 20 or 40 feet above ground. No one is going to walk right up to the canvas that high off the ground and say the image is a little soft. All I’m saying is that “sharpness” is a relative term. Chasing a mythical “perfect” point is a waste of time, especially if the original photos were never sharp to begin with. Its better to balance the image as good as you can get it, and let the RIP handle the rest.
Which brings me to my final point. Most outdoor images are sent from your mechanical to a RIP, and then to a printer. The RIP will automatically uprez your file to the proper size for the output device. As long as the type elements are still sharp (read still in postscript, hence building the mechanical and all possible type in InDesign) then the final image should hold up well. It makes no difference if YOU uprez up your file, or if the RIP uprezzes it, with the possible exception that the RIP will probably do a better job at keeping the file consistent.
Trends in Retouching
Back in December of 2011, someone on a professional retouchers board asked for opinions on the future of retouching. Since the board is a for members only (links will not work for non-members), I’ve duplicated my response here.
A few things here. I see a growing trend in retouching, and I don’t think it has hit its peak yet. Alas, the vast majority of this growth is happening at the low and mid ranges of the work. At a hunch I’d say that for every piece of art one of us professionals crank out, 10 pieces of mid range art are done, and 100 pieces of crappy art are done.
This reflects a similar trend I see which is the growing knowledge of how to retouch. More and more people are starting out in photoshop, and doing their first composites, color corrections, etc. Again, like the statistics I guessed at above, I would bet over 90% of these newbies never get past the “amateur” phase. Probably 8-10% will develop their ability into the intermediate range, and only a small few will reach the rank of “pro”.
Both of these trends are made possible by the growing understanding or photo retouching in the general population. Most people know that one can do something interesting in Photoshop (although most would be fuzzy about the specifics). One can now use the verb “Photoshopped” or ‘shopped” or photochopped” and most English speaking people will know exactly what you mean.
All of these things are a boon for us. The largest hurdle in getting a new client to understand the value of what we do is to getting them to understand what we CAN do. Alas, like the numbers above, most of this new work will start out in the cheap range. They will either hire an amateur, or they will pass on the job to an employee. Most of these new potential photoshop clients will not develop the budgets, or the understanding, to hire a professional retoucher.
Still, I would bet professional retouching holds a consistent 5%-10% of the market share in terms of numbers of items retouched, and probably 50% or more of the market in terms of money earned.
At some point, and no I do not know when, I think the demand for retouching will start to decline, or at least flatten off. Yet numbers of people who gain the knowledge or retouching will probably not peak for quite some time after that. If this happens, then expect to see even the professional range of retouching slowly get saturated with too many retouchers. This will drive down prices, and quality. Neither of which is in our best interest. It will also start to place a greater value on certification of professional ability. Expect to see various ad hoc retouching groups get together and “certify” their professional ability, usually though some sort of professional organization.
All of that is about the work, but that is not all that is changing. The tools we use to retouch are also subject to change.
Sometime in the early 90s, digital retouching started to compete and then overcome traditional retouching. This was a revolutionary change, and not always for the better, as it left a lot of retouching professionals behind. It also made for a lot more work. The good news for us is that I do not see another revolution to our business coming soon. At least not on that scale. We will see some changes, but they will happen at a more moderate rate, and if we are careful, most of us should be able to transition with them successfully.
Our primary tool right now is Photoshop, and the program is definitely starting to get into the bloated range of software. In many ways this is good for us. Without any serious competition, Photoshop will remain largely consistent, which means we can change with it. Adobe is more interested in finding stupid crap to put in it, so they can justify their goal, which is to get you to buy a new version of the software at least once a year. This is how most software companies make their money. The good news is this allows them to evolve the product slowly, the bad news is this tends to make the product more bloated with junk. I don’t expect to see any large changes to photoshop soon because I don’t expect to see any serious competition to it. Adobe has done an excellent job of watching the little guys, and adopting their better ideas. This is a good model for them, so expect to see more of it in the future.
Where I do expect to see change is in the interface with computers. I think iOS (like on the iPad, iPhone, or Android devices) represent the future of ALL computer work. Couple this trend with the higher resolution touch-screen monitors now coming out, and you start to see a glimmer of what our work will be like in the future. 10 years from now I doubt we will be using a keyboard on our computers. I think the majority of our work will be done with our hands right on the screen, and likely using a stylus of some type. If this is true, then expect to see our work areas go back to something like drafting tables, with large surface areas to rest our hands/arms while we work on the big screen. This more “hands on” approach will not be for everybody, but I expect it to eventually dominate because it more accurately reflects how people actually work. IN that sense, the work of retouching will more closely resemble the other arts, like drawing and painting.
Beyond that, expect to see computers getting faster and faster (over 7 times as fast at they are now in 10 years), files getting bigger and bigger, and the process of retouching being more and more automated. A lot of the easy and intermediate retouching work can be automated, especially with faster/smarter computers. The high end work will probably NOT be. I say this because 1) high end work is a highly complex task (in other words, its art), and 2) because there is not enough money in it to make it worth the investment.
Anyway, that’s some of what I see coming down the pipe. As you can guess, I’ve done a bit of thinking about this. I happen to read and write a lot of sic-fi, so projecting future trends is a bit of a hobby.
Proposed Constitutional Amendment
After leaving public office, an elected official will agree not to work with any private or government body which has, or will have, any transactions with their previous elected position, for a period of 8 years.
I just wanted it here as a matter of record. Enjoy.
On Good Service
Teri and I went to Gelson’s the other day to see if they had a particular brand of buttermilk we’ve been using, but has been discontinued at our local store. (Teri is a devote to The Perfect Buttermilk Pancake, and let me tell you, different buttermilks make much different pancakes) For those that don’t live around here, Gelson’s is an upscale grocery store. Not a natural one like Whole Foods, its a regular chain with a nicer look, and more amenities. While we were there, we happened to run into the guy who stocks the dairy case. He was helpful, friendly, and made it easier for us to shop.
Then, because we were hungry and it was past lunch time, we decided to stop by the Deli and pick up a sandwich. That is where we met Lillian. Lillian was standing off to one side of the Deli case, and obviously wore the dress/uniform of an employee. There was quite a crowd around the deli case, the customers were taking their little numbers, the ladies behind the counter were trying to manage the crowd, you know, the standard deli experience.
Lillian was different.
When we glanced her way Lillian smiled at us and asked if we would like to order on the iPad which she was holding. There was a large sign next to her telling us exactly what ingredients (breads, lunch meats, cheeses, condiments, etc.) were offered for making a sandwich, which made the complex task much easier. Lillian herself was knowledgeable, friendly, helpful, and generally made the ordering process pleasant instead of complex and overwhelming. In short she added to our experience while in the store and made our short stay much more welcoming.
So given the choice between dealing with the feeding frenzy in front of the deli case, with the employees removed from the consumer behind a huge glass case, or standing next to a smiling person who is helpful and friendly, you would think most people would choose the person over the counter. Only it didn’t work that way. I watched person after person walk right past Lillian, head right up to the counter, take a number, and enter the crazy, busy deli experience. I don’t know if having an employee in front was new, or that the other shoppers preferred their routine, or what. I hesitate to say what might be the cause, but I can tell you they were missing a chance to talk to a warm friend person, and not a busy harassed lady behind the counter.
In terms of customer service, Lillian was the tops. She made our stay enjoyable by making us feel like we were important and not just another number. Yet for all her gifts, she largely was ignored. I don’t know which is more sad, that an upscale grocery store had to hire a person just to offer a level of service that I think should be standard, or that the regular patrons ignored such service in favor of a less personable approach.
Which begs the question: Who is at fault if a customer consumes a less friendly experience? The store, or the customer?